Press Release: Stoic Week 2019

This year Stoic Week is taking place from the 7th to the 13th October 2019.

Stoic Week is a global online experiment trying to see if people can benefit from following the ancient philosophy of Stoicism. Since its inception in 2012, over 20,000 people have signed up and so far the results have been consistently positive – people do benefit from ‘living like a Stoic’. This is your opportunity to experience some of those benefits too.

The course is free and online, attracting participants from all over the world. There is a series of questionnaires to complete in advance, guided advice for each day of the week, and a second set of questionnaires at the end.

For some background information and reports from previous years in the media, visit:

• John Sellars, ‘Want to be happy? Then live like a Stoic for a week’, The Conversation (September 2018)
• Brigid Delany, ‘My week living as a Stoic: like a Buddhist with attitude, but hard to do when hungover’, The Guardian (October 2018)
• Victoria Lambert, ‘Don’t flap, Don’t rant, Do keep calm: Can a new course based on ancient philosophy really transform your life in just one week?’, The Daily Mail (January 2019)

You can sign up for Stoic Week via the link below or find more information about the project on the Modern Stoicism website.

Each year the organizers of Stoic Week also put on public events to coincide with the week. In 2019 the main event, Stoicon, will take place in Athens, on the 5th October. A series of smaller Stoicon-x events will take place at locations all over the world. Further information about all these events can be found on the Modern Stoicism website.

Stoic Week and Stoicon events are run by Modern Stoicism, a not-for-profit organization set up by a group of academics and psychotherapists.

So, what is Stoicism? Here are some key Stoic ideas:

• Acknowledge that you can’t control much of what goes on in your life.
• See that your emotions are the product of how you think about the world.
• Accept that bad things are bound to happen to you from time to time, just as they do to everyone else.
• See yourself as part of a larger whole, not an isolated individual; part of the human race, part of Nature.
• Think of everything you have as not your own, but simply on loan, that one day will be taken back.